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We have shown the inevitability of certain convictions as to
the scheme of things:
There exists a Principle which transcends Being; this is The One,
whose nature we have sought to establish in so far as such
matters lend themselves to proof. Upon The One follows
immediately the Principle which is at once Being and the
Intellectual-Principle. Third comes the Principle, Soul.
Now just as these three exist for the system of Nature, so, we
must hold, they exist for ourselves. I am not speaking of the
material order- all that is separable- but of what lies beyond
the sense realm in the same way as the Primals are beyond all the
heavens; I mean the corresponding aspect of man, what Plato calls
the Interior Man.
Thus our soul, too, is a divine thing, belonging to another order
than sense; such is all that holds the rank of soul, but [above
the life-principle] there is the soul perfected as containing
Intellectual-Principle with its double phase, reasoning and
giving the power to reason. The reasoning phase of the soul,
needing no bodily organ for its thinking but maintaining, in
purity, its distinctive Act that its thought may be
uncontaminated- this we cannot err in placing, separate and not
mingled into body, within the first Intellectual. We may not seek
any point of space in which to seat it; it must be set outside of
all space: its distinct quality, its separateness, its
immateriality, demand that it be a thing alone, untouched by all
of the bodily order. This is why we read of the universe that the
Demiurge cast the soul around it from without- understand that
phase of soul which is permanently seated in the Intellectual-
and of ourselves that the charioteer's head reaches upwards
towards the heights.
The admonition to sever soul from body is not, of course, to be
understood spatially- that separation stands made in Nature- the
reference is to holding our rank, to use of our thinking, to an
attitude of alienation from the body in the effort to lead up and
attach to the over-world, equally with the other, that phase of
soul seated here and, alone, having to do with body, creating,
moulding, spending its care upon it.
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